Last week, a nasty gremlin stopped by and created havoc in my electronic charged life. It started when my PS/2 keyboard broke.
Now, if you are geeky enough to notice the particular phrase, “PS/2 keyboard”, rather than “keyboard” or “USB keyboard”, I should tell you now there is a good reason for this special mention. Which you will appreciate by the end of this rambling.
I was using an older wireless keyboard and mouse combo, where the receiver end were PS/2 connectors. When the keyboard broke, I naturally replaced both. It so happened I have another similar keyboard mouse combo, with one noteworthy difference. The receiver end for this one was USB. So, off came the faulty set, in went the spare. All was happy again and a few days went by.
Then, a partial Intrepid upgrade notice arrived. Being in beta, you see loads of daily updates, and I thought nothing of it as I innocently click “apply”. Big mistake. As it happened, this partial update was true to it’s name, and did not fully patch things up.
A reboot and I was staring at the login screen but my keyboard and mouse were dead. Nothing I typed appeared in the login field, while the mouse cursor stubbornly stuck to the centre of the screen. Ok, time for some leg work.
First, I thought it might be a bad kernel. So, I rebooted and tried to go into GRUB. But hitting ESC at the GRUB prompt did nothing. What’s going on? Then I remembered. I was using a USB keyboard, and maybe I need to enable USB keyboard legacy support in the BIOS.
So, reboot again, hit DEL to go into BIOS, and set the USB keyboard legacy support to “on”. Now, I could go into GRUB menu. Boot into the previous kernel. But no, problem not solved.
I swapped out the harddisk to my previous Hardy install and hit the Ubuntu Forums. I reckoned if this was a new problem, the first reports should appear there. And I was right. A number of people running Intrepid beta already encountered it, and there was even recovery instructions.
It turned out that while the keyboard and mouse were dead in X, you could still hit CTRL+ALT+F1 to drop to console. From there, you could re-run the updates to fix the problem. Great! I waited a couple of hours for the Intrepid repositories in local mirror to sync up, then performed the updates again. Voila! Back in business.
But wait. Now I got a new problem. Randomly, after a few minutes the mouse would die on me. The keyboard still worked, until I unplugged the USB receiver and plugged it back in. Then, it failed to be detected. After a reboot, it would work again for a few minutes, then the mouse died again. I tried different scenarios. Plugged in another USB mouse. Dead after a few minutes. Once it died, it eventually brought the whole USB bus down. USB flash drives not detected. Tablet not detected. lsusb command hang. Nothing showed up in the system logs the entire time. All these took hours to try and finally at 5am, I packed up and went to bed.
The next afternoon, groggy and irritable, I sat pondering my options. Was it a hardware failure? Did the motherboard gone swimming with the fishes? I decided to shelve the problem, back-up my data and reboot back into Hardy. I have to prepare a draft presentation by Sunday and this not the time to be mucking around.
Suddenly after half an hour or so, the mouse died again, this time in Hardy. A new clue fell into place. The problem was not specific to Intrepid. So, I decided to take on the gremlin through another fifteen rounds and I wouldn’t stop until I pounded it to the ground.
First step: house cleaning. It has been a while since I cleaned up the interior of the PC. A lot of people neglected this point when fixing a tough problem with their PC. From my years of computing, I had encountered cases of hang, crash or corruption which can be directly attributed to dusty PC and corroded electrical contacts.
First, I unplugged the mess of wiring from the back of the PC, moved the PC to a table for easy access, and opened the case cover. Then, unplugged all interior wirings, cards and memory modules. Took out my powerful vacuum cleaner and got to work. Make sure all the electrical contacts on the wirings and cards were cleaned and not corroded. Then, re-assembled everything back.
Did it help? Nope. Mouse still hang. Well, at least now I have a clean PC.
Meanwhile, since I got the vacuum cleaner out, I might as well do a real house cleaning. It has been a couple of weeks and the dust was getting thick. I cleaned the trusty Roomba’s dust compartment (which still held the dirt from previous cleaning) and set it to work.
Next, I used the vacuum cleaner to clean the floor fan. It has accumulate enough dust to affect it’s performance; yes that bad. While cleaning, I noticed the vacuum cleaner itself was loosing performance. Rats! It has been months since I last emptied and cleaned out the vacuum cleaner dust compartment. The list of things to do kept piling up, after being neglected for so long.
Five minutes into it’s business, the Roomba quit with a sad beep. I checked on it. Not sure what’s wrong. Gave it a few taps and sent it on it’s way. A minute later, it stopped again. Took me another minute to fished out the manual from underneath a pile of junk in a storage drawer. Double rats! The Roomba’s dust compartment was clogged. It looked like my floor was too dusty, it took barely five minutes for the Roomba to quit.
Well, can’t clean the Roomba right now; need to work on the vacuum cleaner first. That would require some thorough washing. Half an hour later, I was finally done. Now, I was all wet and sweaty. Time for a shower.
I got back on the desk for another try at the PC. Try again with USB mice, etc. No dice. Finally, I remembered an old PS/2 mouse. I went through my pile of electronic junks for a while hunting for it.
So, when the USB mouse hang, the PS/2 mouse happily continued to function without a glitch. Another clue fell into place. It must be something to do with the USB. I sat there thinking hard. What has changed since before I got hit with the Intrepid repositories problem?
Suddenly, a light bulb went on. The BIOS! I have turned on the BIOS USB legacy keyboard. I went back into the BIOS and turned it off. Then, I went back into Intrepid. After 5 minutes, the mouse was still happily working. After 30 minutes, I started to see a glimmer of hope. After an hour, I declared success. Hurray!
Two hours later, I noticed the PC fans were noisier than I remembered. Reboot and went back into the BIOS. In my tinkering, I had inadventently reset my custom fan controls to default. Tripple rats! The settings were all hex numbers, so you wouldn’t know what fan speeds correspond to what hex numbers. Programmed by geeks for the geeks. I have to start adjusting it by trial and error again to lower the noise.
Went back into Intrepid, install lm-sensors and hddtemp, configured it, and install gnome sensor applet. And the tinkering began. I am going to beat this gremlin until it leaves the house. Time to rock ‘n roll.
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